B3 - Current Advantages of BIM

 BIM offers many benefits over traditional paper drawings in the modern age. These advantages are best described by splitting them into the following categories; functionality, ease of use, and connectivity. Functionally, BIM software allows designers to convey an extremely granular amount of information about their design in an easily navigable manner. Assigning metadata such as material properties to a model element allows for the combination of visual elements with quantitative and qualitative information, a practice that is typically only available to paper drawings in the form of label leaders and hatching patterns. Whereas excessive labeling can convolute and obscure a paper drawing, BIM drawings and models display this information only when an object is highlighted, leading to a more legible drawing overall. 

BIM drawings are not only easy to parse, they are also incredibly easy to disseminate and transport in almost all applications. The ease of use associated with storing an entire project’s drawing portfolio on a laptop or tablet no thicker than a couple of inches at most is unbelievable. The less cumbersome and more readily available a cohesive building plan is, the more likely it is to be carefully reviewed in detail throughout the design process and the more likely it is to be constantly referenced and updated throughout construction. 

The nature of these plans (typically) being stored on a firm’s intranet allows for another degree of company-wide integration; having any authorized employee able to view and edit BIM drawings in real time, even remotely, and see those changes reflected across all copies of the drawing instantaneously is an incredible asset to any design or construction team. 

In addition to this, most BIM suites also offer interconnectivity between several applications that can all use the same model. For example, Autodesk Revit integrates directly with Robot, a structural analysis application that utilizes a Revit model and the associated metadata with minimal effort required to import and export. 

I can understand how the transition to BIM can be somewhat intimidating for established professionals who have only ever worked with paper drawings due to the unfamiliarity and relatively high cost of entry, but i believe the benefits i’ve explained are blatant and pervasive enough to encourage continual widespread adoption of BIM throughout the AEC industry.